This might be a questionable connection in the wider scheme of things, but in the context of an ambitious project by Mauckingbird Theatre, the city's professional company devoted to gay-themed work, it makes sense.

Mauckingbird is running two plays about the late authors in repertory. Tru is a snapshot of Capote on Christmas Eve 1975, when he was 51 and out of favor with the high-society women he'd befriended and amused. The Threshing Floor, a world premiere by James William Ijames, who also plays its 14 roles, is a look at Baldwin toward the end of his days, as the author, essayist, and activist speaks to a young fan who is researching his life.

Each is a one-man show. Tru plays out in the tried, and tired, template that is by now too familiar, with someone talking at you rather than at someone else. Ijames (pronounced EYE-ams) places his Baldwin portrait in a looser framework, and also convincingly performs the role; he gives himself characters from Baldwin's life and plays them all. He also writes a 70-minute one-act, just right for the work.

Tru is a two-act, and too long by one full act, the second. It's performed with industrial-strength charm and trademark Capote flounce by the versatile Chris Faith, who came to the production directly from the People's Light stage in Malvern, where he was playing a goofy butler in Snow White.

Faith has a particularly difficult job in Tru, because Capote, as a role, has been largely appropriated by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won an Oscar for the 2005 Capote. That film has nothing to do with the play Tru, in which Faith manages to win you over quickly as he begins building a nuanced performance that conveys the many sides of Capote, hinting masterfully that they conflict.

Tru was written by the late Jay Presson Allen, a woman who gave us the movies Travels With My Aunt and Funny Lady, and Broadway's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Forty Carats. One-man shows are more common now than they were in 1989, when Tru ran on Broadway with Robert Morse in the role. I presume its skillfully written first act and the blowsy, excessive second, during which Capote disintegrates, may have worked together better back then.

Even Faith - who by Act 2 has made us intimate with Capote - and director Tony Braithwaite can't overcome the fact that the script plops its character into a tour de force, rather than allowing him to organically confront his demons. Maybe that's how it worked in real life, but on stage, it's hollow artifice. Too bad, because until the play loses proportion, Faith (and the script) make it real.

Ijames, who's been popularly cast around town, is an actor with a lot of moves. He uses them nicely in The Threshing Floor, which he wrote with a sound arc and with well-chosen highlights of Baldwin's life. Both plays deal with their subjects' gayness, but Threshing considers it more forcefully - and it was, in fact, a point of contention with Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther for whom some people were, ironically, not created equal.

Katie Coots' handsome living room serves both shows; Matthew Miller's lighting is ill-timed and unintentionally noticeable in Tru, but spot-on in Threshing.